Australian universities will lose a substantial proportion of their staff through retirement over the next decade. A recent study has indicated that attrition of academic staff that are not at the end of their career may exacerbate the problem. To assist in developing appropriate retention strategies, this article examines the ways in which early…

Attraction and retention of highly qualified employees has become an area of concern for Australian universities. It has been suggested that flexible work arrangements can be utilised to achieve this goal once the factors affecting their uptake have been identified. This mixed-method study of 495 academic and general staff at an Australian…

Performance related pay is not common in Australian universities. A number of Australian universities have begun to show interest in implementing more individualised pay arrangements. Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne, has chosen, contrary to the wishes of many of its staff, to be a path-breaker and has introduced a performance…

Government policies designed to redress social inequality are often evaluated by qualitative methods, which prevents the establishment of a causal relationship between policy objectives and outcomes. Social programmes to broaden participation in higher education have been a feature of government policy in Europe, the US and Australia during the…

The majority of tertiary practice-led creative arts disciplines became part of the Australian university system as a result of the creation of the Unified National System of tertiary education in 1988. Over the past two decades, research has grown as the yardstick by which academic performance in the Australian university sector is recognised and…

In Australia, the Excellence in Research (ERA) exercise, first conducted in 2008 and continuing relatively unchanged in 2012, determines the level of research funding made available to Australian universities. However, the use of journal rankings as part of ERA is argued to be problematic (Cooper & Poletti 2011). Through a survey of academics in a…

This paper reports on an exploratory case study that considered the impacts of journal ranking and Fields of Research codes on the publishing decisions of Australian authors. The study also considered the level of alignment between authors' allocation of Fields of Research codes and the codes assigned to the journals in which they were published.…

Excellence in Research for Australia has a number of limitations: inputs are counted as outputs, time is wasted, disciplinary research is favoured and public engagement is discouraged. Most importantly, by focusing on measurement and emphasising competition, ERA may actually undermine the cooperation and intrinsic motivation that underpin research…

The need to articulate and validate creative practice has been made more urgent by the inclusion of the creative arts in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) process. The proof of research quality is tied to government funding and universities have strategically sought to increase their share of funding by targeting their own research…

Despite extensive and on-going efforts, people from a low socio-economic background continue to be significantly under-represented in Australian higher education. In response to this situation, a two year action research project explored the broad issue of higher education access for young people from low socio-economic backgrounds in South East…

Pinnacle is the ANU's teacher training programme for full time PhD students. The Pinnacle Teacher Training Program provides a mentoring system that aims to equip postgraduate students with the skills and theoretical background that they will need to become high quality lecturers. This article describes Pinnacle, and discusses the assessment of its…

Better learning outcomes flow from higher levels of student engagement. When the perception is that student engagement is in decline, there is genuine concern amongst committed academic teaching staff. This paper reports on a pilot study designed to foster an understanding of the factors that influence engagement in undergraduate students in the…

The introduction of the Excellence in Research for Australia scheme has heightened debate amongst research institutions over the use of metrics such as citations, especially given the ready availability of citation data. An analysis is presented of the citation performance of nine Australian universities and the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial…

In 2007, as part of its response to the continuing diversification of students, Central Queensland University introduced a for-credit undergraduate course, "The Principles of University Learning", focusing on "learning to learn" in the Australian university context. The aim was to support the transition of learners with diverse prior learning…

Happiness research provides guidance on what academics can do to increase their satisfaction at work. Changes in external circumstances, such as salary rises, seldom have a lasting effect. More likely to improve long-term happiness levels are exercising well-developed skills, building strong relationships, helping others and cultivating…